by Ben Stevens
Now it seemed that perhaps her dirty work had been done for her, but not in the way she’d expected, wanted, or appreciated. If steps weren’t taken immediately, she and her men wouldn’t have a city to feed on and rule over, but worse still, and seeming more likely by the second, she and her men would follow Don Luis into a fiery grave.
Good thing we all happen to be carrying giant mirrors.
“The attack is coming from the stage lights! Use your shields to reflect the beams and shoot those pinche lights down!”
Sofia withdrew the pistola she carried, and thought with perverse pleasure that she would still be able to use it for its original purpose—to kill Lily Sapphire. She pulled the slide back, chambering a round, and called for Raphael to follow her in the attack.
They turned to the stage and began their charge, shields up and guns blazing.
“Come mierda y muere!” Sofia screamed at the top of her lungs. The counter-attack had begun.
Maya found Sofia before Don Luis did. She’d watched as the beam scorched Don Luis and watched as he’d deflected his death with his cane first, and the bodyguard second. She knew that he had ended up behind the meter-high concrete square with the tree growing out of the center and was deciding how best to proceed. Should she try and get Ratt’s attention, and if she did, would Ratt be too focused on Don Luis and his cover instead of moving the spotlights where they were needed to maximize vampire carnage? She decided she would keep an eye on the tree bed herself and warn Lucy to prepare for a counterattack.
The counterattack came, but not from Don Luis. Maya had already heard several loud booms echo through the night as Carbine’s railgun entered the fray and picked off fleeing vampires, their heads disappearing in red clouds.
But then she heard a closer, quieter crack. Not a distant, cannon-like sonic boom, but something more like a typical pre-Storm small-arms report.
First one, then two, then a volley. Several of the spotlights went out. One crashed to the stage, its mount to the catwalk railing broken clean in two.
Lucy also picked up on what was going on after nearly being hit by the falling spotlight.
Both women looked around in alarm, now fully comprehending that they were taking fire and quickly losing their “big gun.”
There, in the back of the plaza, where the open courtyard met the first block of adobe buildings and was bisected by a road, stood Sofia, flanked by loyal men holding polished metal riot shields and a solid platoon of human guards, as unafraid of the sunlight as the plants of the earth that fed on it.
“Lucy!” Maya blurted out and pointed an outstretched finger in their direction.
“I see them,” Lucy replied coolly and flipped off the stage, landing in a perfect crouch before taking off, sprinting toward the new threat, her bladed club already in motion to clear the way.
Ratt was taking heavy fire and attempted to defend himself by retaliating with the sun-spotlights, a reflexive gesture that was as ineffectual as hurling an insult at them.
When the spotlight in his hands exploded from a direct hit and another conventional bullet grazed his shoulder, causing him to half-spin and collapse against the railing of the catwalk behind him, he knew he was done for and made to retreat.
Clutching his bleeding right shoulder with his hand, Ratt shambled over to the scaffolding ladder that was clamped onto the catwalk and ran straight down to the back of the stage below. He climbed on, and as soon as his weight was fully off the grating and onto the ladder, he realized the shot he’d taken might be more than a graze.
His shoulder sizzled and pumped out a fresh squirt of blood. Its rapidly cooling warmth ran down around both sides of his shoulder and met up again below his armpit, creeping further down to his waist, soaking his shirt in the process.
His right arm failed him, and he dropped a rung, nearly falling completely off.
“Ungh!”
His left arm shot up and hooked through the space between two rungs of the simple metal ladder and he caught himself, his legs flailing. He bounced his shins off another rung somewhere below. Wincing, he gritted his teeth and hissed. The adrenaline rush that came from his near fall helped stave off the wave of creeping unconsciousness that was threatening to overtake him. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating.
He heard the gunfire continue as well as the zings of ricochets bouncing nearby. Even from his awkward position up on the ladder, he could see that only a handful of sun-spotlights remained intact. The portals that Maya had summoned remained open, of course, but with their housings destroyed, they remained stationary, while some had fallen to the stage as well, their destructive beams no more than immobile, though dangerous, columns of death that could be avoided with ease by the regrouping vampires.
We’re in trouble…
Maya saw it too. Even as Lucy waded into the crowd to take out Sofia and her human gunmen, she was met by the first wave of vampires who had either overcome their initial shock at the sprung trap or had realized the spotlights were no longer moving and now posed only a mild threat.
Lucy, while as talented at death as any grim reaper, was right back to where she had been out in the scrub against the savages. None of them were a match for her, even when the odds were thirty to one, but she couldn’t keep them down, and it was only a matter of time before the numbers simply became too many for her to contend with.
Already some were slipping past her, confident that she was occupied enough not to stop them, and they made their way toward the stage.
Maya’s eyes grew with fright as she realized that she and her guardians’ hand had been played; that their opponent had called their bluff.
She was now a very legitimate target, and Lucy was not there to protect her.
One vampire leapt from his spot in the plaza and flew through the air as if he had been lifted by an invisible wire. His legs bent in a way that enhanced the perception that he was more beast than man—hands up, fingers spread, claws flashing in the ambient firelight that surrounded them. He landed on the stage two meters from Maya, who stumbled backward a step, falling into an instinctual defensive stance, like a mouse when cornered by a cat.
He roared his rage at her, revealing his cuspidate fangs, and made a small dip backward before springing toward her, like the pulling of a slingshot.
Maya yelped and flinched, her petite hands rising to shield her face and neck from the coming assault. She felt a wet spray across her face and the rush of wind across her neck. When she heard the sonic boom catch up with the slug, she opened her eyes and saw her assailant separated into a half-dozen pieces that now lay spread across the stage and had already begun the slow but sure process of growing themselves back together. She thanked Carbine in her mind and rushed forward, flipping her back foot out and connecting it with a large chunk of the vampire’s head, sending it flying out into the plaza.
There would be more where he came from, and in short order. Maya found her resolve and began to sing again.
Hurry, Jon.
19
Jon heard the sonic boom a second after he let go of his hammer and watched it crash into the sentry’s chest. The blow lifted the man up off his feet and sent him crashing through the support post that he had been leaning against the moment before he spotted Jon throwing his colleague to his death.
Whoa. I still don’t know my own strength. Better rein it in a bit. I almost sent that guy flying. Don’t want to alert everyone.
Worried that he had been spotted, Jon ducked and spun around, half expecting the fourth guard to be training his rifle sights on him and half expecting the man to be no more. The latter expectation proved to be true.
Good job, Carbine.
Many things had changed over the last month, but Carbine's sharpshooting skill was not one of them. Jon turned back around and retrieved his hammer from the man he had smitten, then glanced up at the hillside and threw a nod and a salute in Carbine’s general direction before hopping off the landing to the city below.
&
nbsp; He landed on the ground with a thud, kicking up a cloud of dust and surprising the hell out of a human passing by. The man froze and stared at Jon blankly. Jon rose out of his squat and chambered his hammer for a swing.
“Friend or foe?” Jon asked in the common language of Home.
The man, dressed in simple farmer’s clothes worn nearly bare, only blinked. In the background, Jon could hear screaming and hollering coming from the city square as well as the broken beat of the repeated but random sonic booms issuing forth from Carbine’s railgun. There was no time to waste; Jon repeated his question in different words.
“Look, I’m here to liberate you. I’m a friend.” Then, taking one hand off the hammer’s handle and placing it on his armor-clad chest, “Me amigo.” The man said nothing, nor moved at all. Frustrated with the language barrier, Jon rolled his eyes, then turned to go, leaving the dumbstruck citizen behind and making his way to the palace.
Jon heard the crack of a small-arms pistol, then felt first its impact, and second the wave of disappointment.
The bullet that struck him between the shoulder blades was the last thing he had expected from a slave he was working so hard to free.
Jon turned and frowned at the man, who held a pre-Storm 9mm pistol in his shaking hands.
Sheesh. Old-gen pistol like that has no chance of penetrating my armor. I should count myself lucky that this guy’s knowledge of armor and ballistics are about as simple as his wardrobe.
Upon seeing Jon’s display of invincibility, the man dropped his tiny pistol and ran. Jon let him go, shaking his head and giving thanks that he hadn’t been forced to kill another human. He was here to slay vampires and free the humans, and meeting violent resistance from humans who had pledged their service to the very power that oppressed them made his job morally difficult. Revolution was dirty, ugly work.
Jon watched the man disappear and then checked his surroundings for threats and opportunities. There, hanging on a clothesline that stretched across a bleak commons area in the center of an assembly of rough, poorly built adobe hovels, came a great opportunity in the form of laundry.
Jon snatched the poncho off the line and quickly donned it. Despite the chaos that had erupted across the city, he was a gringo and would stand out; he needed every edge he could get. Jon secured his hammer under the folds of his new garb and peered across the darkened skyline of the city.
Even from his location at street level, he could see the tip of the palace jutting up into the starry night, its smooth, blocky surfaces periodically flashing reflections of the sunbeams dancing below in the central plaza. Jon began to dash through the streets toward the palace and what was hidden deep inside it, glancing left and right as he went.
Every three or four strides, he could hear the sonic report of Carbine’s railgun, and he hoped that Maya was faring well. The closer he got to the palace and the city square, the more crowded and chaotic the scene became. Here, a small pack of vampires fled from the center, some screaming, others cursing, all running straight past Jon without so much as a glance; there, a vampire made of sterner stuff was organizing a counterattack party of human loyalists. Coming or going, all were blessedly far too occupied with the threat in the plaza to notice a poncho-clad gringo in the dark, who, by running through the street with urgency, fit into the scene perfectly.
By the time he reached the palace grounds, Jon could distinctly make out only a small fraction of the dozen-plus sunbeam rays that his friends had started with. He knew the tides were turning against Maya.
Shit, he cursed silently. Hang on just a little longer, guys.
With that final hopeful thought, he began to climb the steps that led to the front door of the palace. The plan and the subsequent mess it had unleashed was working exactly the way Maya had hoped; it just wasn’t lasting as long as they had wanted.
Hopefully, it was long enough.
Jon made it to the top of the steps and was pleased to see that the front doors were unguarded. Maya’s plan had worked, so far. The finale ambush had drawn all the guards away from the palace, clearing the way for him. He tried not to look like he was out of place as he stood there, glancing around.
I’m overthinking it. Just do it.
He stopped only long enough to look back toward the city center. He could see the plaza in the distance; there was a straight road that stretched from the edge of the palace grounds to the city center. He could see the stage and Maya upon it. She seemed to be surrounded by a globe of glowing light, and Ratt was beside her, but he couldn’t make out Lucy. There was a throng of people in front of the stage. It looked like either a mosh pit or a melee battle. Jon knew it was the latter. He could see only two sunbeams left, and they were now stationary, making their rays of death easy to avoid.
I’d better hurry.
Turning toward the palace entrance, he drew his hammer and swallowed.
Okay. It was the first left, a stairway at the end of the hall… Jon concentrated on remembering the order of the directions given to him by Maya when they’d hatched the plan.
Upon hearing Ratt’s tale, the goddess had determined that slaying the vampires and liberating the humans was their only course of action. Once decided, she had related all she could to Jon and Carbine, hoping they were listening. Entering into a semi-hypnotic trance, she’d recalled the entire evening that she had spent with Don Luis Fernando. She’d watched herself in her mind’s eye as she was escorted through the palace by the king after their stroll through the streets. She could pause, rewind, and slow the play-by-play of the night's events. She glossed over the bits regarding his pompous, long-winded, and megalomaniacal speech, only just mentioning them, and instead chose to focus her attention to the details of every turn they’d made, every doorway they’d entered, every step they’d taken on the way down into the depths of the palace’s heart to witness the secret that dwelled within.
Now it was Jon who had to muster his mental acuity and remember every twist and turn of Maya’s dark journey, while simultaneously keeping watch for anyone else who might be keeping watch for him.
Jon intended to find and kill the demon-urchin. He wanted this—no, needed this—more than anything right now, for if it did not die, then Maya surely would. If he screwed up, if he misremembered just one of Maya’s directions, then he could become lost in the palace, sacrificing time that none of them had to spare. He had to focus on what she had said yet remain aware enough not to stumble into hostiles unawares.
Suddenly, after what seemed like seconds, though surely must have been minutes, Jon found himself standing before the black door with the small circular opening in it. He was amazed both at the fact that he had made it to the door without running into any guards and at the fact that despite his attempts to maintain situational awareness, he had been in the same semi-hypnotic trance that Maya had been in when she’d recalled the directions to him, acting nearly on rote alone. Quickly deciding not to question his good fortune, Jon shrugged off the trance with a quick shake of his head and made to reach his hands into the yawning circles of hungry darkness that were the mouths on the door.
Wait a second… Will the door even accept my blood? I can’t play my hand too soon now… What if it’s attuned only to Don Luis?
Knowing that there was no way to know, Jon found himself eyeing the stone of the decorated slab. Could he smash it with his hammer? Would it alert guards? Only one way to know. In this case, brute force seemed the safest bet.
Knock! Knock!
Boom!
Boom!
Jon cocked back for a third blow just as the hairline fractures from the first two began first to appear, then grow, bisecting the dozen mouths and grinning demon face carved into the half-meter-thick stone slab.
BOOM!
The third time proved to be the proverbial charm. As the head of Jon’s hammer bounced off the door, fist-sized bits of it followed, spilling out onto the ground. The fissures now more closely resembled yawning gaps. Jon spun the hammer in his
grip and used the war-nail to hook and pry. His skin again began to glow with the power of the serum. He felt his body temperature spike. He grunted with the effort as he placed the bottom of his boot against the door for more leverage. When a torso-sized chunk of slab broke free, he nearly lost his balance and had to hop back twice before he regained his footing.
The wave of decay hit his nose before the dust from the crumbling door had even cleared, carrying along with it a palpable sense of dread and persistent, maddening hunger. Jon felt cold wrap itself around his burning body like an ice bath. Every strand of modified DNA in his body was firing the Morse code SOS for fight or flight, and a cold sweat broke out across his dusty skin. He spun the hammer back into its smackdown position.
From beyond the pitch-black veil obscuring the room beyond the door, Jon could hear a dragging slipper-on-pavement sound—the slithering sound of the hundred mouths with their flashing needles. Somebody was awake, hungry, and very pissed off.
Lucy tore into the crowd like a half-dozen tornadoes touching down in the Shanty. Limbs and bits, human and vampire alike, sailed through the plaza like comets, streaming tails of blood and viscera in their wake. Being a cyborg, she had the advantage over normal humans of never tiring, of having machine precision in all her moves. Although it was the only part of her that was still human, even her brain had been enhanced with inorganic circuitry, allowing her to block fear and pain, control and regulate her body’s peptides and hormones and, as in the case of the present moment, multitask in a way that only a computer could, executing four different killing blows, to different targets, simultaneously, while perfectly timing a side-step so minuscule as to escape death by a fraction of an inch without flinching.
